Sheol
by swasdiva
Summary: Once a priest, always a demon. Hell dresses the part. -- Inuyasha/Immortal Rain crossover -- Naraku-Yuca character piece


**Sheol**

Once a priest, always a demon. Hell dresses the part.

--

This is a crossover between Inuyasha and Immortal Rain, a rather obscure manga that deserves to be a lot more popular than it is. Here's my assimilation of Naraku and Yuca/Ys. I'm pretty sure no one except a random few will know what the hell (pun intended) is going on.

Disclaimer: I own one sock. The other got lost in the dryer along with any chance I had to own Inuyasha or Immortal Rain. Damn trolls...

--

I awoke in Gehenna.

What is my name in this life? With the familiarity of this face, does the name even matter?

One glance is all he needs to recognize me now.

I was born as Ys looking like I always do. Black hair. Beautiful face. White skin.

And eyes...

What would you call the color of eyes that have stared at the sun through more than a thousand lifetimes? Burned, maybe. Scorched. Charred. Roasted. Not ashen, though. Never the soot of a dead fire, but the red heat of that first kindling. Never the moment of release, but the torch of that first touch.

A long time ago, I had immolated my own skin to match these eyes, but I hadn't wanted to burn in torment forever.

I just wanted to die _once_.

It was then I had found it, my chance to wish everything away. It was a jewel lit from within like a star, kept pure by a woman's spirit. I couldn't tear my eyes from its clarity, but in my hands it absorbed the color of my soul.

Blackness. The void that carries me in walking, wasting, breathing urns through endless days, in corrupt temples housing an incorruptible spark. I had always watched a thousand human copies melt to nothing around me, their clays buried and lives scattered, dust to dust, and I always saw their faces behind my flaming eyes but never could I keep their fires going.

My only chance to join them was to snuff out humanity forever.

The shinto priestess was the first stroke of my plan, my olympian lightning. I wanted to set the world ablaze through her death and ignite the jewel's wick. But she returned through a dry well and doused my hopes, turning the clouds against me. She rained down on my destruction, and killed me before I could take her with me.

So foolish she was, my first rain.

So empty she was, my lit jewel.

How strong she was. How strong she _is_.

For I see it now, in front of me, in the bounty hunter girl's sky blue eyes, that clear vastness captured in a gaze so unyielding, a reminder of a similar color and countenance on the priestess who killed me over a thousand years earlier. It doesn't surprise me when I recognize her, and who it is she came looking for.

_"Where is he? Where is Rain?!"_

Rain Jewlitt. The Immortal Methuselah. He is the other storm I don't want to pass.

I had waited for the half-demon to be reborn, then when I found him living as a priest I fashioned him to set me free. I bred him as an angel to finish her job. I bound his life to my death. She'll never remember this as I have. She'll never blink and see the pale color of his long hair for the message it was meant to be, nor the inhuman strength in the shade of his pale eyes that had protected her from my wrath so many eons past.

He's lived in this incarnation for 600 years because I fed him the infected heart of his first beloved, making him immortal, but he doesn't remember that I was there when they _first_ met, when I had his beloved nail him by his heart to a tree.

He lived 600 years then, too, for just a small fraction of that life with the same pretty little match by his side and in his hands. She always was a_ spitfire. _She illuminated his days enough to make him go on, alone, for centuries. Her presence was _electric_.

When he had to let her go he didn't wallow as I do. He lived out her memory to the end and then followed her light to a peaceful rest.

He forgot about me. Up until this life, he always had. I was nothing but smoke on the wind, but now, my presence chokes him.

_"Machika!" _he yells so often now, and he loves her again, but he doesn't recognize her, not like he does me.

If he keeps his promise to kill me, they will repeat the cycle in anonymity. Again and again.

And again and again and again. Every meeting a new start.

But I.

I will always be lying in the depths of my cave, scarred and blistered and alone...

_Rain!_

_Machika!_

In the darkness.

_Inuyasha!_

_Kagome!_

Waiting to end it all.

_Yuca._

_Naraku._

Because life is hell, and I am the hole in its middle.

--

So... good? bad? Confusing as sin? If you're lost on the Immortal Rain connections, I highly recommend this manga. Support your local library and check it out!


End file.
